Believing the Image: Political Torture on Film

Convened by Berenike Jung and co-hosted by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (CCM)

Roundtable discussion and launch of Berenike Jung’s The Invisibilities of Political Torture: The Presence of Absence in US and Chilean Cinema and Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

The discussion engaged with questions surrounding the aesthetics and ethics of responding to violent events and collective memory on film; the truth value of digital images and politically engaged cinema; past and current politics of amnesia in the US and Chile regarding their separate and entangled histories.

The invited panel dicussed these topics in relation to Jung’s new book, which examines how US and Chilean film and television make the emotional and collective consequences of torture experientially available to the audience, thereby expanding our conception of torture to include long-term and seemingly ‘invisible’ repercussions.

Speakers: 
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick
Vania Barraza Toledo, Professor of Spanish at the University of Memphis 
Victor Fan, Professor of Film Studies at King's College London
Dr Berenike Jung, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Groningen

Author: Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies

Organisations: Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies

Event date: Thursday, 10 February 2022 - 4:00pm